A collection of huts surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and in the huts lived 500 of the original inhabitants of our area. And so it went with many country towns around Australia.
After working for years in Hollywood where the actors have taken over, it was a real relief to get down there and not only have some children, but also have some actors that had no attitude.
But usually you're waiting around for these editors to do stuff and you get really bored. It was better for them to wait for me!
I no longer knew what it was like to feel Australian.
I remembered the 500 people that lived on a reserve outside my little town, behind a big fence.
I used to play with a model of that yacht and sort of look at it from side to side and there are two obvious primary angles: one from the mast and one from the bow. They're the most dynamic shots you can get and we got them both - I don't remember a shot from the bow in Knife in the Water.
I was given Charles Williams' novel by American producer Tony Bill and I read it not knowing that Welles had wanted to make it into a movie and had, in fact, completed a quarter of the shooting before Harvey died - so I was inspired to make the movie simply from the source material.
Making movies is eating candy. It's a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it's like, you know, a kid in a candy store!
Most Australians live in the cities on the east coast, where contact between black and white occurred as much as 200 years earlier than on the west coast - and where 95 percent of Australians are able to live 95 percent of their lives without ever seeing an Aboriginal face.
Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.
Oh yeah - I watched Knife in the Water, saw the shot, and repeated it. But even if I hadn't seen that film, inevitably the camera would've ended up on top of that mast, I mean if you think of it there are only so many dynamic shots on a boat.
People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct.
So as a toss up between the two - and having to admit that I did make a lot of money making those Hollywood movies - I would say the creative independence of making these two movies far outweighs anything that I felt, and I felt a lot, during the 10 years that I spent in Hollywood.
So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history - and history of repression.
The children, each of those kids is in touch with nature and traditional aboriginal culture so a very important part of getting performances from them was just letting them be and trying to capture the unique spirituality that was in each of them.
The first trip just provided the basis for the whole movie, because I realised this was a movie about the indomitable human spirit.
The more she rejected us the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly, her disdain for authority, her scepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her... She is Molly.
There were a couple Aborigines in my primary school, but we never spoke to them. They kept to themselves, and we never really even locked eyes. They weren't acknowledged officially either.
They empowered me actually to try to make a movie, me a young boy in a country that didn't have a film industry.
Watching Hitchcock and Lean, the movies they made seem to belong to a culture and a form of expression way beyond my experience and potential.
Well, I don't know what they'll turn out to be, but I'm working on a film of Kon Tiki.
Well, I grew up in a small country town.
Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.
You always try to work for your audience, to entertain them, but that being said, obviously, within the studio system you feel the sense of responsibility to the bank.
You know, you go to Hollywood and work internationally, and just the little jokes no longer make you laugh. I was alienated from my own culture.
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